When Hubert Met Audrey

For her costumes for Sabrina, the film that made her the highest-paid actress in the world, Audrey Hepburn went to the Paris atelier of master couturier Hubert de Givenchy. Forty years later, as Givenchy steps down and Hollywood produces a Sabrina remake, Amy Fine Collins re-creates the collaboration that made movie magic, started a lifelong friendship, and gave Hepburn a look that is still the epitome of style.

On the subject of Audrey Hepburn, Cecil Beaton once tartly observed “Nobody ever looked like her before World War II. Now thousands of imitations have appeared. The woods are full of emaciated young ladies with rat-nibbled hair and moon pale faces.” Like mushrooms after rain, suddenly a whole new generation of Audrey clones has sprung up in the forest. Obsessed with the waifish actress, they aspire not only to look like her but to dress the part as well. Divining the trend early, the department store Barneys launched a collection inspired by Hepburn’s dresses, culled from her personal and cinematic wardrobes. Scores of fashion designers have since hopped aboard the Audrey bandwagon, peddling a head-to-heel neo-Hepburn look featuring fitted shifts and low, ladylike pumps. And this month Paramount Pictures is bringing out its remake of Billy Wilder’s 1954 Sabrina, the Cinderellaesque Hepburn classic which defined her image for the rest of her career.

All of this Audrey revivalism has been noted with extreme curiosity by the late actress’s close friend couturier Hubert de Givenchy, who first dressed the star in Sabrina and ended up creating her wardrobe for seven subsequent film roles, as well as for private life. Ironically, this renewed—adulation of le style Audrey Hepburn is peaking just as Givenchy is retiring from the house he founded in 1952. This month English wunderkind John Galliano will replace the veteran couturier, who in October showed the final collection of his 43-year career.

Early one morning in his Paris studio, located just behind the Givenchy shop on Avenue George V, the master couturier sits, erect and silver-haired, at a table in a tiny conference area adjoining his workrooms. Dressed in his traditional uniform of an impeccable white linen smock, whose cuffs he has neatly rolled up, he embodies an old-world, gentlemanly ideal that is as rare today in the fashion world as a well-mounted sleeve. “The other day I was in Venice,” he recalls quietly. “And Egon von Fürstenberg showed me a picture in a magazine. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘all your work is now reappearing.’ Then this week Jeannette [who has worked with him since he opened] showed me another picture, in an Italian magazine. I first started noticing it myself a year or two ago, in American magazines. I began seeing Sabrina necklines,” he says, slowly tracing, with his long, large fingers, a wide horizontal above his collarbone. “And sleeves cut like this,” he adds, chopping the inside of his shoulder with the edge of his hand. “I have seen I don’t know how many young girls in little black dresses or little narrow trousers with black T-shirts. They seem to adore Audrey more for the clothes than the movies—maybe they don’t even know the movies. In fact, last weekend I was visiting a friend in Portugal, and her daughter, who is 14, asked if I had any of Audrey’s dresses. She wanted to see, to touch them.”

Givenchy could easily fill the girl’s request—shortly before she died of colon cancer in January 1993, Hepburn gave the designer more than 25 dresses he had made for her, which he keeps in his Paris apartment. “One by one” he is distributing them to museums around the world, though at this moment he has in the atelier a long, narrow, sleeveless pearl-embroidered tulle sheath in cream, circa 1960, which he is offering to the daughter of an Italian friend, Natalia Strozzi, to wear for her debut in Rome. Givenchy summons an assistant, who ceremoniously carries it out from the workroom. Tenderly, she releases the softly glittering gown onto the table, spreading it out before its maker like a precious treasure. A sumptuous but inanimate husk, it is as empty of life as a lovely shell abandoned long ago by the fantastic creature that once inhabited it.

Late in 1952, the 22-year-old neophyte actress Audrey Hepburn was preparing to embark on a national tour of her Broadway hit, Gigi. She had recently completed her first Hollywood picture with Paramount, Roman Holiday, for which she had been paid $12,500—a quantum leap from the meager $33.60-a-week salary she had commanded as a bit contract player with England’s Associated British Pictures Corporation. Though Roman Holiday had not yet premiered, expectations were high, and Paramount executives were fishing for an appropriate follow-up project for their promising ingenue. The studio sent to its pixieish protégée a script by Samuel Taylor of a play Paramount had just purchased, Sabrina Fair (a name taken from a work by Milton), a frothy comedy about a chauffeur’s daughter who returns from a trip to Paris so worldly and fetching that she ends up having her pick of her father’s millionaire boss’s two eligible sons, Linus and David Larrabee. Hepburn at once agreed to take on the title role, at a fee of $15,000. Her co-stars would be William Holden in the part of the rakish younger Larrabee boy and Humphrey Bogart as the sober older son who, despite his stuffy, unromantic nature, wins the girl. One of Hollywood’s most distinguished talents, the obstreperous immigrant genius Billy Wilder, would direct.

In the early summer of 1953, while Hepburn was performing in the San Francisco production of Gigi, Paramount’s autocratic wardrobe supervisor, Edith Head—who had designed the actress’s Princess Anne regalia for Roman Holiday—flew up for a costume meeting with Hepburn. As she wrote in the 1983 memoir Edith Head’s Hollywood, “Every designer wishes for the perfect picture in which he or she can really show off design magic. My one chance was in Sabrina. . . . It was the perfect setup. Three wonderful stars, and my leading lady looking like a Paris mannequin.”

Head’s dream of a “perfect setup,” however, was abruptly shattered when Wilder announced to the wardrobe diva that he was sending Hepburn overseas to buy Paris originals from a real French designer. Head’s services would be required only for a pre-Paris ragamuffin frock and two insignificant sportswear ensembles Sabrina would appear in after her return to the Larrabees’ luxurious Long Island home. Though Wilder—a man of sophisticated European tastes who fully appreciated the singular allure of French couture—was the one who informed Head of the change of plans, it was, the director says, Hepburn who had actually come up with the idea. For a clothes-mad actress with limited resources—an embroidered cotton blouse from Givenchy cost nearly $3,000 at the time—the chance to wear genuine Paris couture was a fantasy come to life. “Clothes are positively a passion with me,” Hepburn confided to a journalist on the set of Sabrina. “I love them to the point where it is practically a vice.”

Sometime later during that same summer of 1953, the lanky, aristocratic, 26-year-old Hubert de Givenchy, in the throes of preparing the fourth presentation of his career—an Oriental-themed winter collection, to be shown in late July—received an unexpected telephone call from his friend Gladys de Segonzac. Married to the Paris head of Paramount, Segonzac was also the directrice of Schiaparelli, where Givenchy had worked for four years before establishing his own business in 1952 on the Rue Alfred de Vigny. The reason for Segonzac’s call, Givenchy learned, was that “Miss Hepburn” had arrived in Paris and wanted to see him at once. Busy as he was, the young couturier’s interest was piqued—“I was thinking she meant Katharine Hepburn,” he now explains. Roman Holiday—which would win her a Time-magazine cover and an Oscar for best actress—hadn’t opened yet, and there was no reason for him to be familiar with the obscure newcomer who had recently created the title role in the Broadway production of Gigi. The actress was then merely, as Hepburn later put it, “a skinny little nobody”—dressed in an outrageously quirky manner for someone about to have her first encounter with the latest Parisian fashion sensation. Givenchy distinctly remembers greeting “this very thin person with beautiful eyes, short hair, thick eyebrows, very tiny trousers, ballerina shoes, and a little T-shirt. On her head was a straw gondolier’s hat with a red ribbon around it that said VENEZIA. I thought, This is too much!” Eccentric as Hepburn’s getup was, her appearance that day, recalls Dreda Mele, then the directrice of Givenchy (now Armani’s general manager for France), “was like the arrival of a summer flower. She was lumineuse—radiant, in both a physical and spiritual sense. I felt immediately how lovely she was, inside and out. Though she came to Givenchy out of the blue, there is no doubt that they were made to meet. Audrey was always very definite in her taste and look. She came to him because she was attracted by the image he could give her. And she entered that image totally. She entered into his dream, too. I repeat, they were made for each other.”

Hepburn respectfully explained to Givenchy that she was in pre-production for the movie Sabrina, a story which involved a young girl’s metamorphosis, after a two-year stint in Paris to attend cooking school, from a plain, pubescent servant’s daughter into a knowing, soignée siren. Though Hepburn didn’t mention it, Givenchy could easily have guessed that until this moment she had (as she told Vogue’s Paris-bureau chief Susan Train years later) “never even seen an haute couture dress, much less worn one.” (She claimed on another occasion that before she met Givenchy she had been wearing homemade clothes.) Though from the start Hepburn had favored Givenchy, who was then, as she told Train, “the newest, youngest, most exciting couturier,” Segonzac had initially tried to steer Hepburn to Balenciaga—but no one had had the temerity to disturb the reclusive master so close to collection time.

Captivated as he was by his unexpected caller, Givenchy demurred, explaining to Hepburn that it would be impossible to help her. “I told Audrey that I had very few workers and I needed all my hands to help me with my next collection, which I had to show very soon. But she insisted, ‘Please, please, there must be something I can try on.’” Givenchy finally relented, proposing that she try on some of the samples that were still hanging about the atelier from the previous season’s collection, spring/summer ’53.

Hepburn began by putting on what she later described as “that jazzy suit”—an Oxford-gray wool-ottoman tailleur with a cinch-waisted, double-breasted scoop-necked jacket and a slim, calf-length vented skirt. The sample, which the model Colette Cerf had worn in the show, fit nearly perfectly, Givenchy remembers. “They both had the same thin waistline.” Hepburn finished off the suit with the hat with which it had originally been presented, a saucy miniature turban of pleated pearl-gray chiffon, concocted by Givenchy’s in-house milliner. “The change from the little girl who arrived that morning was unbelievable,” Givenchy says. “The way she moved in the suit, she was so happy. She said that it was exactly what she wanted for the movie. She gave a life to the clothes—she had a way of installing herself in them that I have seen in no one else since, except maybe the model Dalma. The suit just adapted to her. Something magic happened. Suddenly she felt good—you could feel her excitement, her joy.”

Audrey next selected a white strapless ball gown, down whose svelte sides and back a detachable train cascaded, culminating in a spray of black ruffles. Above the ankles and as slim as a string bean in front, it was confected of organdy and embroidered with flowers of black silk thread and jet beads on the bodice, skirt, and train. Dreda Mele, who had previously borrowed the sample and worn it to a ball, grows ecstatic at the memory of her first sight of Hepburn in the snowdrift-white dance dress: “She was something unreal—a fairy tale!” Givenchy agrees: “It gave her a very flattering line, especially pretty when she turned to move or dance.”

Hepburn’s final choice was a black cocktail dress, fashioned from a ribbed cotton piqué woven by the venerable fabric house Abraham. Fastened by a tiny bow at each shoulder, the dress also buttoned down its deep V back before flaring out below the fitted waist into a full, flirtatious ballerina-length skirt. Its most dramatic features, however, were its deeply carved armholes and shallow, razor-sharp horizontal neckline. “What used to be called a décolleté bateau,” Givenchy says. “Afterward it was called the décolleté Sabrina.” Audrey loved this neckline, he says, because it hid her “skinny collarbone but emphasized her very good shoulders”—which were as broad and powerful as the rest of her was narrow and fragile.

Though Givenchy had not shown the black cocktail dress with a hat, Hepburn found a medieval-looking toque in his atelier that perfectly suited her face, the ensemble, and the requirements of the story. As snug as a bathing cap and paved with rhinestones, it covered most of her ears and, due to the serried peaks projecting from its circumference, gave her the illusion of wearing a storybook crown. Givenchy says, “Audrey always added a twist, something piquant, amusing, to the clothes. Though of course I advised her, she knew precisely what she wanted. She knew herself very well—for example, which is her good profile and which is her bad. She was very professional. No detail ever escaped her. Billy Wilder approved of everything she chose, and so I gave them the samples to use for the movie. Billy’s only concern was that the clothes adapt to the form of her face—they had to all correspond to the visage.”

As the Sabrina schedule allowed Hepburn to linger a few days in Paris, Givenchy invited his sprightly new acquaintance to dinner at a “bistro existentialiste” on the Rue de Grenelle. “Immediately we had a great sympathy,” the couturier recalls. “She told me about the beginning of her love affair with Mel Ferrer, and said, ‘You are like my big brother.’” Before long Hepburn was calling him up “just to tell me how much she loved me—and then she’d say bye-bye and hang up. She remained from that time on absolutely, unbelievably loyal to me and everyone here at the house. The entire staff adored her, everyone had enormous respect for her—she became part of the family here. I have always considered her my sister.

“She was so disciplined, so organized, she never was once late for a fitting. When she needed things that I did not make—a sweater or maybe a trench coat—she’d take me shopping with her. Later, when she was married to Dr. Dotti and living in Rome, sometimes she needed something immediately and would go to Valentino. But she’d call me up first and say, ‘Hubert, please don’t be furious with me!’ We never together had an argument. She never considered ours a business relationship. When I launched the fragrance L’Interdit with her face as the image she never asked for any percentage or any payment.” In fact, the actress’s confidence in Givenchy ran so deep she asked him later in life to be her légataire testamentaire, a mediator of her will. Recalls Dreda Mele, “The two of them were very alike—so rigorous, well organized, concentrated on their work—and behaving so well at every moment of life.”

For her part, Audrey, always ruthlessly self-critical and achingly vulnerable, found in Givenchy one of the few people in her life who could make her feel secure. In print, she referred to Givenchy as “a personality-maker” and a “psychiatrist,” and, chronically unsure of her acting abilities, she went so far as to maintain that Givenchy’s clothes made up for what she lacked in dramatic technique, “It was often an enormous help to know that I looked the part,” she explained. “Then the rest wasn’t so tough anymore. Givenchy’s lovely simple clothes [gave me] the feeling of being whoever I played.”

As the actress soon learned, her flawless Givenchy wardrobe was one of the few successfully resolved matters on the Sabrina set. Shooting was lagging months behind schedule. Ernest Lehman (brought in by the director from MGM to revise the screenplay when an exasperated Samuel Taylor bailed out) and Billy Wilder were staying up around the clock writing, or rewriting, the movie scene by scene. Some days the dialogue wasn’t ready when the actors arrived on the set. Wilder was suffering from severe back pain, which made him even feistier than usual. Holden was drinking far too much. And Humphrey Bogart—indignant at having been Wilder’s second choice to play Linus Larrabee (Cary Grant was unavailable), envious of William Holden’s easy camaraderie with the director (they had worked together on both Stalag 17 and Sunset Boulevard), and irritated to be playing opposite a novice starlet, who, he claimed, “could not do a line in less than 12 takes”—was relentlessly uncooperative. He taunted his adversaries with vicious imitations of Hepburn’s trilling, singsong voice and Wilder’s thick Austrian accent. He even went as far as to call Wilder, whose family members had been killed in concentration camps, a Nazi—and to tell a reporter that the whole movie was “a crock of shit.” In retribution, Bogart was barred from the daily ritual of sundown cocktails. Wilder managed to keep his cantankerous player in line with the perpetual threat that he and Lehman would rewrite the ending so that Holden got the girl. Avoiding embroilment in these internecine squabbles, Hepburn bided her time learning the rules of baseball from Ernest Lehman (the World Series was on), or tooling around the set on a green bicycle (a gift from Wilder), dressed between takes in a cartoonish, candy-cane-striped top and trousers filched from her production of Gigi.

Lehman remembers that because of the frantic, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants shooting and writing schedules one of the movie’s crucial scenes was nearly “written wrong.” Hepburn, as Sabrina, meets in her Parisian cooking class the kindly 74-year-old Baron Saint-Fontenelle, who takes her under his wing and into French society. He sympathizes extravagantly with her heart-rending crush on David Larrabee, proposes for her an elfin new haircut, and advises her on a cosmopolitan new wardrobe. Just before her homecoming, Sabrina writes from Paris to her chauffeur father back on Long Island, “You can meet me at the train—the 4:15. If you should have any difficulty recognizing your daughter, I shall be the most sophisticated woman at the Glen Cove station.” The movie then dissolves to the solitary figure of Sabrina pacing on a deserted railroad platform, devastatingly chic in her Givenchy suit and hat. On a long leash she walks a miniature poodle, its silver-gray fur tonally compatible with her ensemble. Then William Holden’s David Larrabee whizzes past in his Nash-Healey Sports roadster, screeching to a halt when his jaded playboy’s eyes light upon this dazzling apparition.

“We had a set made of the Glen Cove railroad station, and the scene was already halfway shot when I told Billy to stop everything—it had to be redone,” Lehman recalls. “I was so new to Hollywood I didn’t know you didn’t go straight up to a director and criticize everything he was doing! It’s hard to believe now, but until that moment Bill Holden was supposed to recognize Sabrina immediately as the chauffeur’s daughter.” Lehman’s epiphany, partly inspired by the sultry elegance of Hepburn in the Givenchy suit, was to make the object of Sabrina’s lifelong infatuation “think he’s picking up a strange, charming, and attractive woman. The scene needed a concept, a gimmick, a trick. Before, it didn’t have one.” The new situation gave Lehman license to “insert all the flirtatious dialogue with double entendres.” The reshooting took place on location in Glen Clove, where Paramount president Barney Balaban’s neo-Tudor estate had already provided the exteriors for the Larrabee mansion. “The clothes almost made the woman,” Lehman muses. “They were extremely helpful to the character, the mood, the movie. They made the transformation believable.”

The movie’s next pivotal scene also turned on one of the Givenchy creations—the angelic white ball gown. “A lovely evening dress!” Sabrina exclaims to David Larrabee. “Yards of skirt and way off the shoulders!” This is the cue for the film’s great Cinderella moment, when Sabrina, finally a guest—not a lovesick, wistful outsider—at one of the Larrabees’ fabled parties, makes an enchanted entrance onto the millionaires’ lantern-lit terrace, leaving a trail of slack-jawed men in her wake. Charles, the prissy butler, breathlessly reports back to the kitchen, “You should see Sabrina! The prettiest girl, the prettiest dress, the best dancer! The belle of the ball! And such poise! As though she belonged up there!” The brunette Sabrina’s nemesis, David’s blonde fiancée, Elizabeth Tyson (played by Martha Hyer), appears at the dance dressed in an Edith Head gown that sets off Hepburn’s all the more brilliantly. As dark and fussy as Givenchy’s is pale and simple, it now seems dated—a fate that the French dress, by some miraculous legerdemain, manages to escape. Further, Hyer’s ample bustline, spilling out of her plunging black bodice, appears matronly beside Hepburn’s garçon manqué physique. No wonder Billy Wilder confidently quipped to a magazine, “This girl single-handedly could make bosoms a thing of the past!” Hyer also wears ostentatious earrings and a double-strand pearl choker, à la Barbara Bush, while Hepburn’s attenuated white throat is jewel-less, her ears ornamented only by modest pearl drops. Wilder gleefully recalled, “Here was this chauffeur’s daughter going to the ball and she looked more royal than all the other society people in New York!”

So resplendent was Hepburn in the glamorous Givenchy gown that when Wilder began to shoot the scene of her dancing with Bogart in the Larrabees’ indoor tennis court, bit by bit her fawnlike radiance burned into the actor’s dusky, rugged face. “Bogey complained that Wilder was getting only the back of his head,” Lehman says. “It was true—but it wasn’t planned that way in advance. You edit as you go.” Bogart said to his agent, Phil Gersh, “Look, this guy is shooting the back of my head, I don’t even have to put my hairpiece on; I’m not in this picture.” Explains Lehman, “What happened with that scene is that Billy Wilder fell in love with Audrey’s image onscreen.”

Apparently, it was not just the celluloid likeness of Audrey Hepburn but also the flesh-and-blood girl herself who bewitched the men on the Sabrina set. William Holden, 11 years older than Hepburn and long married, became intoxicated with his co-star—who reciprocated in kind. Holden even took Hepburn home to meet his wife, Ardis, who had resigned herself to his infidelities in exchange for the dubious privilege of being Mrs. William Holden. The illicit couple became so transported by their mutual passion that they even discussed marriage—an idea Hepburn summarily rejected once she learned that her suitor had undergone an irreversible vasectomy. (This revelation freed her to resume her affair with Mel Ferrer, who would become not only her husband—the bride wore Givenchy—but her co-star, in the play Ondine and in her next movie, War and Peace.)

Hepburn wore the final Givenchy outfit—the eponymous cocktail dress—for the script’s Scene 104, which opens, “INT. LINUS’ OFFICE—(LATE AFTERNOON). Start on a figure spinning like a top.” Out of this furiously twirling black-and-silver spiral of stardust the scintillating Sabrina materializes, enthroned on Linus’s executive-suite swivel chair. Her little Givenchy princess hat is perched on her head, and her stem-like arms, sheathed in black gloves, stretch across his boardroom table. Aglow with expectation and as perky as the twin bows fastening her dress, she is, as the script demanded, “smartly groomed for a night on the town.” Linus will take her out to dinner at “the darkest corner table of the Colony,” then squire her to Broadway to see The Seven Year Itch (an in-joke—Wilder would direct the movie version a year later), and afterward lead her to the Persian Room for dancing. It is during these sequences and in this dress that Sabrina’s affections drift away from the roguish David and attach themselves instead to his more responsible older brother.

In a story that has such an ethereal atmosphere of make-believe, Givenchy’s real-life, up-to-the-minute dresses provided—as did the crisp, glossy cinematography—the firm rooting in the material world that the film needed. “I can’t think of any other picture before Sabrina that made use of clothes in the same way. It was a real breakthrough,” says Ernest Lehman. “The way Audrey looked in Sabrina had an effect on the roles she later played. It’s fair to say that if she had never gone to Paris she wouldn’t have had that role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The Sabrina clothes fixed her image forever.”

Hepburn invited Givenchy to come to California for a screening of Sabrina—his first trip to L.A.—and an introduction was made to Edith Head. “Then they showed the film—and my name was mentioned nowhere!” he says, still slightly stung at the memory. When the credits rolled, Head’s name appeared next to the words “Costume Supervision,” and that was it. “Imagine if I had received credit for Sabrina then, at the beginning of my career. It would have helped. But it doesn’t matter—a few years passed, and then everyone knew. Anyway, what could I do? I didn’t really care. I was so pleased to dress Miss Hepburn.”

Sabrina opened to surpassingly favorable reviews in America, particularly where Hepburn’s performance was concerned. In his column dated September 26, 1954, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it “a knockout . . . one of those smooth escapist films, which, when done with supreme sophistication, is one of the happiest resources in Hollywood. . . . Audrey Hepburn, the magical young lady . . . flows beautifully into the character of the chauffeur’s lovely daughter.” Another paper’s reviewer noted that “the sight of Miss Hepburn, gazing out from the screen with a look of bewitching candor in her large and limpid eyes, is delectable indeed. . . . Sabrina [is] the plus chic of chicks.” And an early, sanguine prediction of “hearty b.o. possibilities” was more than borne out. Sabrina was such a success, in fact, that when Hepburn signed on for War and Peace agent Kurt Frings inflated her salary to the stratospheric sum of $350,000—a fee that established her as the highest-paid actress in the world.

If Sabrina had vaulted Hepburn to the loftiest reaches of the Hollywood empyrean, her character survived the voyage intact. When her agent informed her of her new price tag, the ingenue gasped, “I’m not worth it. It’s impossible! Please don’t tell anyone.” Nor was she about to lose track of her dear new friend in Paris, who, every bit as much as Billy Wilder, had helped define her elegant professional persona. In November 1954, as part of their honeymoon, Hepburn and Ferrer flew to her native Holland for the Dutch premiere of Sabrina. Among the activities Hepburn engaged in during this triumphant home-coming—all organized for the benefit of disabled Dutch veterans—were a photo-signing session at a department store attended by thousands and a teatime fashion show in which Hepburn herself modeled dresses by Givenchy. Interestingly, photos of Hepburn taken during this charitable public-relations-tour-cum-honeymoon show the actress wearing exactly the same three outfits by Givenchy that she had worn as Sabrina. For the movie opening in Amsterdam she once again slipped into the embroidered organza ball gown; for a visit to her childhood home in Arnhem she recycled the Oxford-gray suit, over which, due to the cold, she wore a short fur coat. And in a photo published in the November 1954 Elle, she appears at a Dutch restaurant table smiling beatifically in the black Sabrina cocktail dress, with Mel hovering at her side. Evidently, Paramount allowed her to incorporate the costumes into her personal wardrobe—a practice continued throughout her collaboration with Givenchy, which helped maintain that rare fluency between her on-screen and offscreen personae.

A publicity blitz of a different kind attended the movie’s February 4, 1955, premiere in France. The Paramount machine, shrewdly hoping to capitalize on Sabrina’s French-fashion angle, opened the movie in Paris during collection week, on the day after Givenchy’s spring/summer couture show. Not leaving anything to chance, the publicity department pressed into service purveyors of all kinds of goods. Fifty music stores in Paris displayed in their windows record albums of the songs from Sabrina. Clothing shops, as well as the Campagnie Générale Transatlantique, whose steamship the Liberté figured prominently in the film, also got into the act. Further fueling Sabrina fever in France, Paramount offered—through the boutique Prénatal—gifts to any mother who on February 4 gave birth to a baby girl and named her Sabrina. More cunning still, throughout France and North Africa a “Do You Look Like Sabrina?” contest was staged, in which winners were awarded prizes of both money and products. The climax of all these festivities was the arrival of “Sabrina” herself, who held court at a press conference at the Ritz.

The effect of the film on Givenchy was immediate and newsworthy. For his February presentation he hired his own Audrey look-alike, a mannequin named Jacky, as house model. Givenchy also named one of the dresses in his collection “Sabrina.” Elle reported that the couturier had been inspired throughout his collection by his new muse’s “flat chest, narrow hips, swan neck, and short hair.” Not surprisingly, the French movie critics greeted this “Cinderella story à l’americaine” with a shade more cynicism than their Stateside counterparts and their colleagues in the fashion press. One reviewer remarked that the Larrabee servants’ quarters would “bring joy to many French millionaires in search of lodgings.” Another complained that Audrey Hepburn reminded him too much of certain young ladies of Saint-Germaine-des-Pres “who cut their hair with rusty scissors.” Still another, apparently thinking of the scenes in which the actress wears the Sabrina dress, suggested that Miss Hepburn had been “transformed for five painful minutes into Miss Famine herself.” But most had generous praise for Hepburn, who, as the newspaper La Croix conceded, “had become a Parisienne down to the tips of her fingernails.”

More important, Sabrina reaped industry accolades. The Writers Guild honored the uneasy troika of Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor, and Ernest Lehman with its “best written American comedy” award, and the screenplay also earned a Golden Globe. In their poll of fans in more than 50 countries abroad, the Foreign Press Association of Hollywood and the Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association came up with Audrey Hepburn as the winner of the “world film favorite” award. Sabrina also landed a bouquet of Academy Award nominations: best actress, best director, best cinematography, best screenplay, best art direction, best costumes. Of all these potential Oscars, however, only one came through—best costumes—an award which Edith Head shamelessly accepted without even the slightest nod of acknowledgment to Givenchy. Effectively, Head had treated Paris’s most admired young créateur as if he were just another anonymous cog chugging away in her vast wardrobe engine. Irene Heymann, Billy Wilder’s longtime agent, says, “Edith always thought she designed everything in town. She was notorious for never giving an assistant credit, even if she hadn’t done a thing.” But Head, obviously galled at being so completely upstaged (even if she was one of the few to know it), went even further, insisting in her memoirs and even until her death that she had created (as she wrote in 1959) “the dress, whose boat neckline was tied on each shoulder—widely known and copied as the Sabrina neckline.”

Givenchy today generously allows that, as moviemaking often requires duplicates of costumes in the event that a dress becomes damaged in some way, Head may have at some point executed a copy of the black cocktail dress in her Hollywood workrooms. Perhaps, then, it was this facsimile that she added to the costume collection which she began in the 40s and took on tour with her around the world.

While it is true that Seventh Avenue manufacturers knocked off the Sabrina neckline by the truckload, the phenomenon Audrey Hepburn unwittingly precipitated went far beyond garment-district profiteering, Dreda Mele maintains. “Everyone in the street was copying Audrey’s hair, the way she moved, the way she acted, the way she spoke. Everybody wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn. She became a person of a whole generation. They copied her for 10 solid years after. She created an image above her movie image.”

Back at the Givenchy atelier on Avenue George V, the couturier is also meditating on the enduring fashion legacy of Audrey Hepburn. “I dressed so many other stars. Jennifer Jones, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor—we had such problems with her, with the timing of her fittings. Not like Audrey, she was always late. And the essayages—with her poitrine—so difficult! But no one ever wanted to copy what I made for them. I once was asked to do a wedding dress in the same style as the Sabrina ball gown. For the marriage of her son, [former couturière] Meryl Lanvin asked me to make a version of the black Sabrina dress. Then, in my last couture collection, I adapted that design for another dress, which I showed with a jacket.” And for Barneys’ special Givenchy collection last year, he did yet another spin on the Sabrina cocktail dress—this time in silk faille and without any bows—which immediately became the line’s top seller.

“Ever since Sabrina,” Givenchy continues, “Audrey kept exactly the same measurements. Do you want to see her mannequin?” One of Givenchy’s loyal assistants fetches from an unseen region of the atelier the dress form on which Hepburn’s clothes were fitted for four decades. Headless and limbless, with high little pancake breasts and black lines sectioning off the body into some obscure system of seamstress trigonometry, the dummy is an eerie yet somehow comforting evocation of the late actress—a De Chiricoesque portrait in stuffing, cloth, and metal. The dress form’s unchanging measurements tally up to an impressively taut 31 1/2-22-31 1/2 (the actress stood five feet seven inches).

“Audrey’s style is so strong,” the designer continues, gazing reverently at the doll-like instrument of his profession. ”Audrey’s silhouette is so strong. It doesn’t ever look passé. She is so present. It is difficult to think she is no longer with us—that I can no longer pick up the phone to call her. Her son Sean and I talk as if she is still alive. There are few people I communicate with this way—just my mother and Audrey. But I feel Audrey more strongly. Audrey is more recent. The force, the presence, the image, is so strong. I was just in Switzerland with Sean for the christening of his daughter—Emma Audrey. We were in the same church, with the same Protestant father, where Audrey was married. And where her funeral took place. Then we went back to her house. Her presence was there, too—the personality, the simplicity, the love she gave to the rooms. It was all still there. The emotion is still so strong,” he adds, his eyes now brimming with tears. A discreet man, he reflexively bows his head—and then recovers to rise for a handshake. “Excuse me,” he says softly. “I am needed in the atelier.” He then disappears through a door to resume work on the very last collection of his career.